[DigitalToday reporter Jinju Hong] A solo miner has successfully mined a block using only home bitcoin mining equipment and received 3.14 BTC as a reward. Interest has grown in the industry because it was achieved with small personal equipment rather than a large mining farm or corporate-scale facilities.

CoinPost, a blockchain outlet, reported on Monday that the miner used 12 Canaan Avalon Nano 3S units and two Avalon Mini 3 units to mine bitcoin block number 951771.

The mining was carried out using so-called solo mining. Unlike the common approach of joining a mining pool and sharing rewards, a solo miner independently finds a block and takes the full payout. The final amount received, including the block reward and transaction fees, was tallied at 3.14 BTC. At prices at the time of publication, it was worth about 36 million yen.

The case has drawn attention because of the scale of the equipment. The combined hashrate of the miner's 14 machines was about 147 TH/s, a very small level compared with the total hashrate of the global bitcoin network.

The outlet estimated the chance of the equipment set finding a block at about 1 in 6.7 million. Mining records in particular showed one Avalon Nano 3S as the device that found the block, and the success probability for that unit alone was calculated at about 1 in 149 million.

The miner was reported to have used Braiins Solo, a solo mining service. The service supports independent mining participation without requiring users to build their own bitcoin full node. It is characterised by allowing users to receive the full reward if they find a block.

The equipment is also considered suitable for use in ordinary homes. The Avalon Nano 3S sells for about $250 to $300 per unit and is designed to operate at about 33 to 40 decibels. It supports WiFi and wired network connections, and some users are reported to use it as an auxiliary heater in winter.

Experts, however, point out that the case is difficult to view as a typical profit model. Most individual miners also join mining pools because of the low probability of success. Mining pools split block rewards among participants in exchange for more stable expected income.

Cases of successful individual solo mining are reported steadily but remain rare. Over the past year, the number of bitcoin blocks mined by individuals on their own was tallied at about 20. In November last year, there was also a case in which a block was mined using an ultra-small mining device with a hashrate of only 6 TH/s. The miner obtained about 3.146 BTC at the time, with the success probability estimated at about 1 in 180 million.

In February, there was also a reported case in which an individual miner secured about 1 PH/s of computing power for several days through a hashpower rental service and then obtained 3.125 BTC. This case differs in that the success came using only home equipment owned by the individual without borrowing external hashpower.

The industry assesses solo mining success cases as symbolic examples showing that barriers to entry for individual mining are lowering. But because the probability of finding a block remains extremely low, the prevailing view is that the case was driven more by luck than profitability.

Ultimately, the case is assessed as showing that an environment is being created in which people can attempt bitcoin mining with home equipment, while also again showing how rare solo mining success is in the current market of intense network competition.